Feeling Good About Your Partners' Relationships: Compersion in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships is a 2021 study by Sharon M. Flicker, Michelle D. Vaughan, and Lawrence S. Meyers, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, that produced the first validated psychometric scale for measuring 📝compersion.
The paper reports two studies that together built the Classifying Our Metamour/Partner Emotional Response Scale (COMPERSe). The researchers first conducted open-ended interviews with 44 adults in 📝Consensual Non-Monogamy (CNM) relationships and analyzed the responses thematically, then validated the resulting 11-item measure against related psychological constructs with a larger sample of more than 600 participants. The finished scale resolves compersion into three factors: happiness about a partner's relationship with an established 📝metamour, excitement about a partner's potential new connections, and sexual arousal at the thought of a partner with someone else.
The three subscales showed strong internal consistency and clear convergent and divergent validity, establishing compersion as an empirically measurable, multi-dimensional emotion rather than a single anecdotal feeling. As one of the first instruments of its kind, the COMPERSe anchored the small body of compersion research that followed — including later studies on what facilitates and hinders the experience, work tying compersion to cognitive empathy and relationship satisfaction, and a 2024 Polish-language adaptation of the scale.